Business decision-makers in Asia Pacific (AP) are increasingly aware of the importance of business intelligence (BI) and broader analytics to business strategy and execution. However, lack of internal expertise remains a significant barrier to BI project success.

To succeed in the region, BI service providers must provide guidance on how to translate data access into actual insight and information into business value. This requires a strong understanding of local cultures, business practices, regulatory frameworks, and market dynamics. When evaluating providers, understand how their capabilities are likely to evolve across five categories:

People. To minimize project risks, understand who will be the on-site business and technical leads on BI projects and how many successful implementations this staff has led in a similar industry and similar technical environment within the region.

Technical expertise. Service providers need to demonstrate region-specific knowledge of the technical characteristics of various BI tools, platforms, architectures, and applications. Most companies will not have all of the necessary skills on site, so closely evaluate ease of access to remote staff from the service provider as well.

Chinese manufacturers are repositioning. They’re willing to invest more in improving their core competencies, like R&D and design capabilities, by using outsourcing providers that have successfully served foreign peer companies in the same industry. They must dedicate all their resources — including internal IT systems and solutions like ERP — to meeting this goal.

We recently published a case study on Tagal, a joint venture of ThyssenKrupp Steel Europe and Angang Steel in China. The company was finding it difficult to face up to new business challenges; not only was its infrastructure aging, but its original outsourcing services agreement was constraining business development.

To solve these problems, Tagal changed its sourcing strategy and successfully migrated its ERP system to an Itanium x86 platform to accelerate business processes. The resulting ERP efficiencies enabled employees to process orders and reports twice as fast as before. This has improved Tagal’s relationships with its customers, which are some of the world’s largest automakers. Tagal also reduced its total cost of ownership by 20% in the first nine months alone, primarily due to the simplified sourcing strategy.

How did Tagal achieve these tangible outcomes? It redesigned its service contract and employed three key principles when re-evaluating vendors:

Modifying sourcing governance. Tagal drew on lessons that it learned from 10 years of outsourcing. Its new service provider contract contains more penalty terms; for instance, the provider now must refund the outsourcing fee in any month in which it does not fix two system errors within an agreed time period.

Over the past few months, SAP Services has embarked on a major software-enabled services transformation of its offerings and operating models. The strategic intent is to increasingly rely on IP-based solutions (including SAP’s Rapid Deployment Solutions portfolio and assemble-to-order methodology) to deliver outcomes faster, with lower risks for clients and, eventually, support value-based pricing. Next on SAP Services’ transformation road map? I believe that the organization needs to quickly change the perception of the rest of the SAP ecosystem, which still views SAP Services as a competitor.

SAP Services’ business model used to merely rely on staffing “rock star” consultants on client projects in order to facilitate the implementation of complex solutions. The new strategy aims at positioning the 15,000 service professionals on SAP’s newer solutions (e.g., cloud, mobile, HANA . . .) in order to ensure that early projects generate the promised outcomes. In order to achieve this goal, the delivery teams need to be much more focused on collaborating internally (with the R&D team, for instance) as well as externally (with clients). SAP Services will also need to increasingly work collaboratively with its partners in order to ensure the success of the overall SAP-as-a-Platform strategy.

HP recently hosted its Asia Pacific (AP) and Japan analyst event in Singapore. The company presented its “New Style of IT” value proposition and how it intends to position a combined HP hardware, software and IT services stack to deliver client value. After the Boston event back in February, I was particularly interested to see how HP Enterprise Services (ES) is positioning itself as the tip of the spear of the “one HP” messaging and offering in Asia.

When assessing service providers’ relevance to customer needs, I focus on two major areas:

Red ocean offerings – where service providers need to help their clients build scalable, flexible, secure and cost efficient technology foundations around cloud, mobility and analytics.

Blue ocean offerings – where service providers need to help the CIO engage business stakeholders to drive better business outcomes in areas like customer experience, for instance.

Orange accelerates programmes to get through tough market conditions. Orange’s’ vision in 2013 is essentially the same as the one communicated last year. However, new CEO Thierry Bonhomme is accelerating cost saving and cloud initiatives in light of tough global market conditions. The core portfolio was presented as connectivity, cloud services, communication-enable applications, as well as new workspace (i.e., mobile management and communication apps).

Orange proves its capability in network-based services and business continuity. Key assets are its global IP network and its network-based communications services capabilities. In this space, Orange remains a global leader. These assets form the basis for Orange taking on the role of orchestrator for network and comms services, capabilities that have (literally) weathered the storm, proving its strength in business continuity.

Recently we attended a Colt Technology Services analyst day in London. It was great to see a technology services provider who is trying to embrace both disruptive ICT trends and challenges facing enterprise IT. Here is a high level summary of our views from the event:

Dan: Colt views its network assets not as its key differentiators - but its IT services. Although IT services today account for only a small fraction of Colt revenues, Colt views its network infrastructure assets as a means to an end to support IT services. Whilst we agree that network infrastructure runs the risk of commoditisation, Colt’s network helps to differentiate Colt’s offering from both IT service providers without network infrastructure and carriers with a less impressive network footprint. Quality network infrastructure is the basis for developing reliable, secure, and compliant ICT solutions. Maybe Colt ought to view itself more as a communications integrator than an IT Services provider.

John: Colt’s provides a strong European IaaS offering. One of the presentations focussed on Colt’s European datacenter footprint. At Forrester we get many inquiries on hosting and IaaS-specific options for Europe as many clients have to address regulatory and business requirements for data to reside in specific countries. Colt has a substantial number of data centers in European countries including the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, and Switzerland.

I concluded my March 2013 report on the role of software assets in business innovation by proposing that “The combination of software assets, strong domain expertise, analytics, and as-a-service delivery models will increasingly allow traditional service providers to reinvent the way they deliver business value to their clients.” I was glad to hear that IBM recently announced a deal with L’Oréal that directly supports this position. The announced engagement actually includes all these components:

The procurement domain expertise of IBM Global Business Services addresses business pain points. L’Oréal USA grew rapidly over the past few years via an aggressive acquisition strategy that caused indirect procurement processes to remain highly disparate. The company knew that there was a significant gap between negotiated savings and realized savings in its indirect procurement operations. IBM GBS consultants brought strong procurement expertise to work with L’Oréal’s existing sourcing team to transform existing processes. IBM Global Process Services (GPS) category experts are working with L’Oréal to develop and implement category sourcing strategies.

Ten days ago, three of us traveled to Japan for a Fujitsu analyst day held in conjunction with the firm’s huge customer event – the Fujitsu Forum. The analyst day was a follow-on from the firm’s European event last fall. At the two events, the management team, led by Masami Yamamoto, president and representative director, and Rod Vawdrey, the president of Fujitsu’s International Business, talked about the organization’s vision and key imperatives:

Creating a common vision around “Human-Centric Intelligent Society.” Management highlighted publishing the firm’s global vision document. Speakers repeatedly pointed toward Fujitsu’s new “human-centric” vision for how information technology improves business, personal, and societal outcomes. Fujitsu is positioning itself as a provider of solutions aimed at facilitating the activities of consumers and businesses, combining elements of its hardware, software, and services portfolio.

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Organizations in growth markets across Asia have not traditionally been heavy consumers of outsourcing services. Having lots of on-premises hardware still carries some prestige for local CIOs, particularly in China and India. The availability of relatively inexpensive IT staff in local markets has also helped them deliver acceptable service levels to the business. Until now, that is. The combination of quickly rising IT salaries, increased competition from regional and even global expansion, and growing demands among business stakeholders to more effectively engage customers has put pressure on CIOs to increase the performance of their organizations.

More and more CIOs I speak with are struggling with how best to effectively transform their IT capabilities and meet fast-changing business requirements. In particular, whether to embark on this transformation journey alone or leverage outsourcing partners. In a recent report, I profiled organizations in Asia that are leveraging external service providers to accelerate their IT maturation. One example is a manufacturer with 10,000 employees and operations across Asia that outsourced its entire IT infrastructure environment to improve and homogenize service levels. Another is a large Indian bank that outsourced its entire IT department to a service provider and improved its maturity level from a 3 (on a scale from 1 to 10) to a 6 in less than a year.